Episode 134: How HR Drives Strategic Growth in the FMCG Industry (an Interview with Paulette Alviti)
In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David is joined by Paulette Alviti, Chief People Officer of the global snacking company Mondelēz International. Paulette has a wealth of strategic HR experience, helping organisations such as Foot Locker and Pepsi Co. drive business results through the lens of culture and talent.
With Mondelez's ambitious growth strategy, Vision 2030, Paulette is currently shaping the HR functions operating model to align with the organisation's business goals. And in this episode, David and Paulette explore the role of the HR function in driving this growth.
The conversation will also cover the following:
How the role of the chief human resources officer and HR function has evolved since the start of the pandemic
HR’s pivotal role in business and digital transformation
How to create a culture of equity in organisations who have adopted hybrid working where a significant proportion of employees still work exclusively onsite
How Mondelez is piloting a virtual reality onboarding platform to drive the early stages of employee experience
The emerging skills required by HR professionals
Enjoy!
Support from this podcast comes from TechWolf. You can learn more by visiting: techwolf.ai
David Green: Christmas is just around the corner, and I'm sure that we have all started digging into our favourite chocolate and biscuit brands, chocolates and biscuits that have most likely been produced by Mondelēz International, one of the world's biggest confectionary production companies.
Today, we are lucky enough to have Paulette Alviti, Chief Human Resources Officer at Mondelēz, on the show to talk to us a little bit about the important role the HR function plays in achieving Mondelēz's ambitious growth plans.
Paulette Alviti: I do think that is probably the biggest key, having HR professionals who are really, really wired to what is happening in local markets and anticipating what is happening, so what is the word for talent in those geographies; what is the going practice of what certain skills are worth; thinking about whether you want to buy or build those capabilities, depending on where you sit in your market and how much you're willing to invest, or how big of a priority those are; thinking through that model.
David Green: Paulette has had a stellar HR career and along with sharing her experience on the invaluable role of the HR function and the FMCG industry, our conversation will also cover topics such as how the role of the Chief Human Resources Officer and HR function has evolved since the start of the pandemic; we'll look at HR's pivotal role in business and digital transformation at Mondelēz; we'll look at how to create a culture of equity in organisations who have adopted hybrid working models; and we'll also look at the emerging skills required by HR professionals; and there's a lot more that we'll dig into as well. So, grab a biscuit, tune in and let's get started.
Paulette, welcome to the show, it's great to have you on as a guest. Before we dive into the conversation, can you please share with our listeners a little bit about yourself and your role at Mondelēz?
Paulette Alviti: Yes, of course. Thanks, David, appreciate the invite today. Good to see you and be with you. So, I'm the Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Mondelēz International. We're a global snacking leader with 2021, our net revenues were about $29 billion. So, we're known as a house of brands that hopefully many of your listeners know and love including, I'll name a few here, Oreo, Lu, Belvita, Ritz, those are some of our biscuit brands, as well as Cadbury Dairy Milk, Milka, Toblerone, some of our chocolate brands. That's just a few.
I joined the company back in June 2018, so I'm pushing five years here. I'm responsible for the HR function worldwide and pretty typical responsibilities, focus on talent managements, leadership capability development; big focus on organisation, effectiveness and change; total rewards; employer relations; and a big focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.
My team's key focus, if I could for a second, just building a winning growth culture; we talk a lot about that here at Mondelēz, to help drive our local-first operating model, which is the way we talk about how we run our business, and my goal is to help enable our purpose, which is empowering people to snack right; pretty simple and clear purpose that's been a rallying call for all of us around Mondelēz, putting our consumers at the front of everything that we do.
I've been in this HR field for about 30 years now and I'm inspired and happy about partnering to drive business results through our focus on culture and a really big focus on talent.
We're all about enabling our long-term business goals. My passion has always been around consumer-centric businesses that also win through their people, so obviously that's the connection to HR and human capital for me.
David Green: Having been a Chief People Officer and Senior HR Leader for over a decade, how would you say the role of the Chief People Officer has changed since the start of the pandemic?
Paulette Alviti: Well, a lot has definitely changed, and I think it's been a shining moment, if you will, for CHROs and for HR as a function. We're a big, global organisation, we've always worked in a distributed model, we've got operations in 80 countries, we sell products in more than 150 all around the world, so we're accustomed to managing a big, diverse workforce. So, we've got big production environments and traditional offices, so distribution centres, people sitting in shared spaces now.
But the pandemic certainly put a big spotlight on the importance of engagement and how to keep caring for all of our people, and the camaraderie that makes what we do enjoyable and effective is still working. And of course we had to put the frontline right at the centre. Our workforce is mostly a frontline-based organisation. We call them our makers and bakers and we say that with a ton of affection.
Now, we had to invest pretty significantly in health and safety measures to make sure that they were all protected in their teams, and we found ways to secure vaccines for on-site distribution, we accelerated a global flexible working pledge, which was the term that we use, and a wellbeing programme that got really significant legs, focusing on mindfulness and mental health; and as the pandemic continued, it became more strenuous on our people and we responded to that in a pretty big way.
But I think most importantly, the lasting investments were around strengthening how we worked with each other informally across the org. Like many companies, we increased the frequency of our virtual town hall meetings to try to keep everybody connected, we encouraged our leaders to have frequent check-ins, probably more than they ever even had previously, and our CEO even started bringing his dog onto the town halls, which was pretty funny.
It started by accident, which was fun, and that created a movement for everybody else to be themselves and bring their true selves to work.
I think the role of the CHRO in bringing people together is more important than ever. We know that we have to understand our customers and know what they are really looking for, and we have to unite our teams to be able to deliver it. So, culture is right at the middle of that and I've always believed when you can get that right, your people can feel cared about, they can feel connected to the purpose of what you're trying to do, the sky's the limit, and our progress has been shown that.
David Green: I understand you're in the first year of the next stage of your Vision 2030 Growth Strategy. I'd love it if you can share more with listeners about Vision 2030 and specifically the role that HR is playing to help enable this growth and enable this strategy as well.
Paulette Alviti: Yeah, I mean this is an exciting time around Mondelēz, hitting ten years. I mean, a lot of our brands have been around forever, 100 years or more, and through different acquisitions in our history, came together and created what is now known as Mondelēz. But to have success since 2018, so year-over-year, we've got growing momentum.
So, to be able to put out a vision for 2030 is pretty exciting. And we've got four very clear pillars, and culture and sustainability are key as part of that, but the first one is all about growth, not surprisingly, accelerating growth and focusing on our portfolio. 90% of our revenue in our core categories, which as you heard from our brands I mentioned, are around chocolate biscuits, baked snacks.
The second is all around execution and we're investing more than $1 billion to become the digital commerce snacks leader, which is a nice, bold ambition, aiming to deliver 20% of revenues from digital channels by that 2030 date. Then around culture, which is the third pillar, strengthening the company's local market, we think local-first operating model, to make sure that we're empowering all of our colleagues, that we're promoting this growth culture that we talk about, and we're continuing to build a team of deep and diverse talent who can deliver on this strategy.
Then the fourth pillar, important one around sustainability, helping to drive the positive change at scale across our company, focused on environmental governance priorities, creating long-term value for the business and for all of our stakeholders. That's a big, important piece of what we do. And to enable the strategy over what we say is the next decade, we're focused on building this team of deep and diverse talent as I mentioned; it's a big growth enabler for us. We're doubling down on programmes and diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, and including things like mentorship for leaders and getting really behind, in every market across the globe, our investments and early career diverse talent recruitment, bringing in the next generation that's going to lead this company.
Additionally, we're expanding investment in top talent programmes, rigorous processes around planning for the workforce right around succession and skillsets that we know we're going to need. And we all know our colleagues are more and more hungry around career growth, development, and we actually have a measure at Mondelēz that looks at sufficiency around talent.
Maybe the other area we're investing in is around these future-forward growth capabilities, mostly around commercial. We're launching a bespoke -- we actually already launched it, a General Manager Academy, and the reason that's important is because we're focused on commercial excellence, but we're focused on how that brings end-to-end capability. In order to really unlock opportunities in this day and age, we have to work cross-functionally between sales and planning and marketing and operations, and that's a big pillar around future growth capabilities.
There's a component of our strategy that has certainly focused on organic growth, but there's also an inorganic component, so being good at acquisition work and being able to extract the value and have it be harmonious into the bigger Mondelēz family is something that we've been very focused on.
David Green: Huge agenda, so an exciting time to be part of the company but part of the HR function that's helping deliver on Vision 2030 as well.
It would be quite good to understand how obviously the significant plans on growth and some really big changes that the company's going through, how does this your operating model in terms of how you're working as an organisation and how you're working in HR as well?
Paulette Alviti: I mentioned a little bit earlier this idea of local first. We actually use the term "local first but not local only" as a way to talk about where our priorities are, and it's all grounded in the consumer and the teams that are closest to the consumer.
We're organised around business units and anybody above a business unit basically exists to enable their success in local market. We sell products in 150 countries around the world and a lot of the brands represent, we call it the "taste of the nation" in countries where we sell them.
It's critical that we stay close to those customers and on top of those local issues and those trends. So, this model makes sense for us.
The talent philosophy as part of that is centric around putting the brands and consumers at the forefront, aligning our rewards. We have strategic key performance indicators around the company that have to reflect the unique needs and demands of the local market. At the same time, we're providing rich career experiences to our colleagues in this model. So, while we need to enable local, our teams want to be part of a broader enterprise that also creates opportunities.
But this commitment to this local empowered culture has really allowed us to get much closer to our retail customers who sell our products, individual families who consume them; and at the same time part of our culture focuses on the "not local only" part, ensures that we have a companywide mission in our values and simply stated, we're aligned in making the right snack for the right moment, made the right way, that's sort of our governing principle around our mission.
And looking ahead, we're going to continue to strengthen this operating model. We think it's been a differentiator for us. A component of that is empowering our employees to get behind what it means to enable a growth culture; it's all about them and their contribution to be able to help us do this.
David Green: And interestingly, you've mentioned quite a few times the flexibility that you're increasingly offering the workforce, and the fact that most of your team, your employees, actually don't have the luxury of being able to work from home. The big topic we hear about is hybrid work, but the reality for many organisations is that a significant proportion of their employees don't have that opportunity; they're working in factories, in warehouses, or directly with customers.
I'd be intrigued to hear how you've approached that as an organisation, for example how you create equity when some of the workforce is potentially working hybrid and others don't, and even where you've got people working maybe more virtually versus some others that are maybe in an office more and they're part of the same team, how you create that equity across the team and across the organisation.
Paulette Alviti: Yeah, I mean we've been talking a lot about this discussion on equity in general. It's just really intensified over the last few years; what you're referring to, David, is one example of that and as business leaders around the world increasingly recognising the role that the private sector can play, an important role in building a just and equitable society on all these different dimensions. So, I think it's important to frame up the conversation by underscoring that increased representation of historically underrepresented groups is a part of that story.
Achieving true equity requires building a culture that really leverages the benefits of diversity, and we firmly believe that. We talk a lot about what that means at the consumer and why our teams need to look like our markets. And it needs to be a place where our colleagues feel comfortable bringing their unique ideas, their perspectives and experiences to the table; so it's not just diversity, it's the inclusion side of that, or else you don't get the benefit.
At Mondelēz we're building the culture in a number of different ways. Yes, we're trying to meet the changing needs of the frontline workforce and our office-based teams simultaneously, and I can maybe give a couple of examples of what we're doing.
So, we have a global, holistic employee wellbeing programme that we launched about 18 months ago that we feel really good about and it was well timed. It does include this focus around a flexible working pledge and what does that mean so that we all support each other. And then, as you were talking about, the frontline and those that aren't able to have the same type of flexibility, there's other ways that we've been supporting them around employee assistance programmes in particular, helping to get better at this whole wellness topic and break the stigma around mental health challenges. And we offer a broad range now of educational programmes and training tools to help colleagues address what we say is mind and body and also connection.
We've also significantly expanded our inclusivity training. This is a big component around equity in general. We've got a couple of thousand of our leaders already across the enterprise engaging in understanding how their leadership activities really have an impact in advancing diversity and especially inclusion. We have a robust set of programmes and practices to expand the pool of our diverse talent.
I mean, a couple of examples at Mondelēz, we have a goal to ensure gender and racial diversity on all of our hiring slates, and I'll share an interesting fact. In 2021, we over-indexed by almost a 2:1 ratio of the percentage of women hired versus the percentage that were screened for the open positions. Basically, that means that we have an orientation of leaning in, and when we have qualified female leaders, we're hiring them. And in the US, a couple of things that we're doing, we're partnering with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, where we offer financial assistance to really outstanding students attending one of its member schools.
That includes 47 of the publicly supported HBCUs, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, predominantly black institutions. And we're also a lead national partner for the Boys and Girls Club of America's Youth of the Year programme.
David Green: Wow, lots of great examples there, Paulette, on inclusion and diversity, and culture and wellbeing prior to that as well. When we spoke a couple of weeks ago, we talked about how obviously from a business level, you're looking at digitising I think it was 20% of your business as part of the Vision 2030 programme. We know at work, we're using more and more digital tools all the time.
I'd love to understand what role technology is playing in digitising the employee experience for employees at Mondelēz.
Paulette Alviti: When I joined the company, we kicked off a pretty big journey around enhancing and modernising and supporting leaders with our HR operating model to enable a great employee experience. And we have a new global human capital management system that we put in place, and we moved to a shared service HR operating model, further enhanced service model. And interestingly enough, we did that in the middle of year one of COVID, so that was not an easy feat to do that globally across all of our countries, but it was an important commitment to help get a big step in the right direction around what does it mean to have a really great employee experience. And the tools and technology are a big obvious piece of that.
So, this is a transformation that's many years in the making, but focuses on simplifying our core people processes, the things that all managers have to engage in, just to do the annual things that keep our people leadership processes going; and we're trying to give more time back to our managers. Technology can help us do that. So, the least intrusive, high effectiveness that we can create in the tasks that we ask of our managers is a huge unlock for them. I think the whole world is struggling with, "How do we create more capacity for our teams?" In HR, we play a role, we own these baseline systems and processes and we have to make them have better user interfaces, they have to be more intuitive, the knowledge access to policies and practices and step-by-step instructions to make things really easy is a big, big task for us in a company the size of Mondelēz.
Our teams in India created some new digital tools. They've got some new apps that they’ve been able to put in place where if you're in a distribution centre or you're working in one of our bakeries, as an example, you don't always have the opportunity to work on simple things, to check on payroll or to make different requests, or to use some of the benefits that we afford our people. These benefits exist for the frontline and yet, they're the ones that have the most difficulty being able to access them through technology. So, our team in India did a great job, they came up with a great new app that automates a lot of these things in local Hindu and English language, and it's just been a bit unlock for the frontline. So, we need to keep going in that direction and do more and more of that.
The other place that I think is going to be exciting for us in the future is how we use virtual reality.
It's in its infancy stage at our company, but we've had some early wins using this VR technology in places like onboarding which, when you're trying to optimise people's time, be wary of how much travel people are doing, whether that's for health reasons or cost reasons, all these things that we've been trying to manage, we were able to build some real personalised experiences using the virtual headsets for onboarding.
For us, that's pretty important, because this is who we exist to support. Again, back to this local-first model, so getting people out experiencing what it feels like in our tech centres and our operating centres. We think there's some real merit here.
David Green: Well, we talked about skills and obviously, one of the pillars of the Vision 2030 people strategy is building and accelerating the capabilities of your employees and managers across a whole gamut of skills. How are you going about understanding the skills and capabilities of your current workforce versus the capabilities that you need in the future; and how does that support your talent acquisition strategy, but maybe also how does it support your merger and acquisition strategy as well?
Paulette Alviti: So, I mentioned a little bit earlier some of the commercial growth capabilities that we've been getting behind; that's one of the main areas, investing in technology and continuous learning programmes certainly. Some of the biggest investment areas to drive these future-forward commercial capabilities are, I mentioned Agile, creating these Agile processes to get simpler ways of working; that's important.
I mentioned a little bit about these commercial areas, this General Manager Academy that we've built, teaching this end-to-end excellence.
What was really cool about building a bespoke programme like that is, a lot of the expertise on how to do things well within a company are taught best by the people who are great at it in the company, and sometimes that's hard to do because the folks that are running the business don't always have the time to do that. I'm really pleased, as we've been talking more and more about our culture and the investment of leaning in on building out capabilities, creating time for our people for learning, for education, for experiences, and our leaders carving out a little bit more time to invest in sharing their expertise so that the organisation benefits from it.
So, this General Manager Academy was exactly an example of that, where we had general managers with expertise in different markets around the globe coming together and say, "You know what, in Brazil, this is the best practice example. We're going to focus here", or revenue growth management in a market in the UK as an example, and how do you take the best of what Mondelēz global capabilities are and be able to lift and shift them? And through education and skill building, it's a really powerful way to do that.
I mentioned this big focus around digital and the investment that we're making behind it.
With that is some work that we've been doing that we launched this year around our Enterprise Digital Learning Hub, which does a couple of things. One, it's a resource for tremendous skill-building; we've got 1,100-plus programmes now that thousands of our people have been enrolled in, and there are three to seven courses within each of those programmes, and it may take them a couple of months to complete. But we've got 2,500 courses being offered across all of our business units and our functions.
They do a couple of things.
One, they're focused on the transformation initiatives that are under way. If we're going to make investments behind new tools, we need to adapt them, we need to use them, we need to sunset the old ways of doing things, so we have to be really mindful and serious about everybody getting the skill-building that they need to deliver that. And then the other is, our colleagues want to be learning beyond that, they want to be exploring, "What does digital commerce mean, even if I'm not in a commercial role?" So, having the access to how cross-functionally, having certain departments understand the levers and the expertise in the functions that they also work with, has proven to be a pretty good unlock back to this end-to-end capability-building that we've been investing in, and this is all through this digital learning acumen hub that we've been building.
David Green: What role is data and people analytics playing in that? Is the data that you're collecting maybe around skills supporting things like workforce planning and, as you said, career-pathing and succession-planning within Mondelēz?
Paulette Alviti: Yeah. I mean, for HR professionals, we have a whole learning strategy for our own function, and sometimes it's the shoemaker's children sort of story; we were so focused on supporting the organisation through the pandemic that last year, we decided we need to double down on our HR skill-building and we put a series of programmes in place, that I'm actually really proud of, from high-potential programmes to these digital programmes we have, to new programmes for different hubs in our function, whether you're a people leader or you're in our shared services model, a lot of new programming.
But underpinning across all of that is the use of data and using data to actually form insights that can affect decisions in our local markets. And we had, probably like many of your listeners with the investments behind you, HCM Enterprise Solutions, an onslaught of data that a lot of companies didn't have, a lot of people teams didn't have. And so, we've spent the last year trying to harness that, trying to get smart with dashboards so that we don't get lost in too much data; that can happen. So, trying to teach our own HR team around how to use that data, how to apply it for problem-solving, and to use it in strategic ways that align to what's happening in your business.
David Green: Now, I know you're only one year into the Vision 2030 people strategy, Paulette, but I'd love to hear, I'm sure our listeners would as well, have you seen any results so far; and if so, which ones can you share with listeners?
Paulette Alviti: I think what's nice about the Vision 2030 is we didn't come out with, "Here's a whole bunch of new priorities", it's been a continuation.
We've gained confidence in the strategies because they have served us well since we put them in place, largely back in 2018 into 2019, when we restructured and we created this local-first operating model and we put incentives around that model, and we talked about our growth algorithm in ways so that everybody understood the levers of the business that needed to be pulled, so that we could have a flywheel of investing continuously into the business that would be able to propel our growth. So, there was a lot that has been foundational in what we have set up.
We have embedded some key performance indicators that we talk about, everywhere around the organisation, that are people related and we continue those. One is around engagement, one is around our talent depth, our diversity, equity, inclusion efforts around women representation, around our black management representation, and we've had some early wins already. In black management representation in the US, obviously where we track that, in 2020/21 alone, we had an improvement of 60%, which is great.
Our women in senior management roles, we've been focused on for a number of years, but a couple of years ago, we were only at less than 20% of women in our senior level, director and above roles, and now we're pushing 40%, which is our planned goal. Our employer brand recognition, so even though Mondelēz is ten years old, not everybody knew who we were. I remember when I joined the company, we would say things like, "Monda-who?" So, we had a lot of work to do to be able to have our recognition be as strong as some of the other CPG companies or other global Fortune 200-plus that are name-recognised.
So, employer brand recognition became a big part of what we focused on. And our followership, we've been making improvements, just one data point for LinkedIn every year; this past year, up another 22% alone, doubling our job views, achieving double-digit increases in applications and platform hires, and that says a lot. So, we're at a point where we compete well in market for top talent. That is terrific. Some of our brand's in the strength, but our performance of where we were in 2018 to where we are now, and confidence from all of our stakeholders around why we can feel confident that this vision for 2030 is something that everyone should have some confidence that we can deliver on.
David Green: What would be the one piece of advice that you'd give to your peers, HR leaders and HR professionals listening, to help them add more business value, as you and the team are clearly doing at Mondelēz?
Paulette Alviti: I mean, I think the power in HR is figuring out how to focus on a winning culture. The culture is designed and lined up to support the business goals. For us, we call that a winning growth culture, it's been something that we've been rallying around. But I think really great HR talent knows how to do that in the environment that they're operating, with the talent and the ecosystem that they're operating in.
For Mondelēz, that's this local empowered culture and I've said that a number of times, but that's not something that's easy to retain and cultivate when there is complexity in every market that you need to contend with. And we're focused on our consumers and our products, and we're really proud of what we deliver to the consumers and families who consume them, obviously.
So keeping that front and centre as the stewards of culture, those values that I mentioned, we're the ones that need to keep those front and centre.
We're FMCG, right, Fast-Moving Consumer Goods; it feels like it's moving really fast, and categories are changing and tastes of the consumers are constantly changing. It feels like there's a lot that continues to change and our role is to try to help design organisations and get our teams to think one step ahead so that we can be more nimble, and we don't miss out on any of the opportunities that the marketplace can bring, and that's been really my rally call to our team, this focus on deep and diverse so we're ready.
We don't want to not be able to take on an acquisition or an expansion in a market, or be able to go where thankfully the category growth is around the areas that our business, that we're great at.
So for us, that's a big deal, so that would be my advice; connect your culture aspirations to your business and then think about how nimble you need to be in this changing context of complexity that's been around us for a couple of years, and probably is never going back.
David Green: It does look like it, doesn't it? Paulette, that's a great piece of advice I think there for listeners.
How can HR help the business identify and then prioritise the critical skills it needs for the future?
Paulette Alviti: I think you need HR leaders that are really in tune with the business, and I think they have to be really, really close to the markets that they're operating in. For me, you heard a little bit about my background, I always grew up in these consumer-facing organisations where HR was always about being a catalyst to drive the business. If you weren't doing that, you were overhead that could be redeployed somewhere else, frankly!
So, I do think that is probably the biggest key, having HR professionals who are really, really wired to what's happening in local markets and anticipating what's happening, so what is the word for talent in those geographies; what is the going practice of what certain skills are worth; knowing and anticipating the capabilities that are going to be required and starting to invest earlier in them; thinking about whether you want to buy or build those capabilities, depending on where you sit in your market and how much you're willing to invest, or how big of a priority those are; thinking through that model.
It's probably a combination of both. Some, you probably invest in and you start bringing in earlier on and building capabilities that are bespoke to you, like I was mentioning our GM Academy would be an example of that; and others, where you might not have the luxury of time, where you're going to have to look in the mirror and sometimes help our business partners see that we're behind the curve and we need to catch up, and that there's things that are moving fast, based on what we are seeing in local markets, that we have to be able to adjust and get after.
David Green: Well, perfect way to end that there. I love that quote there about HR being catalysts to drive the business, I think that's something we might be highlighting when we promote this episode. So, can you let listeners know how they can get in touch with you, follow you on social media, if you do social media, and find out more about your work at Mondelēz?
Paulette Alviti: Yeah, definitely, please. Would love our listeners to become part of our broader communities.
So, we're on Facebook, Mondelēz International; we're on LinkedIn, Mondelēz International; we're on Twitter @mdlz; and on Instagram @mondelēz_international, all lower case. So, hopefully we'll be able to include those. But lots of ways to tap into what we're about and follow us, and really enjoyed being part of your podcast, David, it was a good discussion and I'm glad we were able to share some of the things that we're doing across Mondelēz, and hopefully it will be sparking some interest from some of your listeners.
David Green: I think it will, you're doing some amazing work there, Paulette.
Thank you so much for being on the show.
Paulette Alviti: Thanks, David, it was a pleasure. Take care.